Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

In the last five years, private companies, research institutions as well as public sector organisations have issued principles and guidelines for ethical AI, yet there is debate about both what constitutes "ethical AI" and which ethical requirements, technical standards and best practices are needed for its realization. To investigate whether a global agreement on these questions is emerging, we mapped and analyzed the current corpus of principles and guidelines on ethical AI. Our results reveal a global convergence emerging around five ethical principles (transparency, justice and fairness, non-maleficence, responsibility and privacy), with substantive divergence in relation to how these principles are interpreted; why they are deemed important; what issue, domain or actors they pertain to; and how they should be implemented. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating guideline-development efforts with substantive ethical analysis and adequate implementation strategies.

Artificial Intelligence: the global landscape of ethics guidelines.

Paid crowd work offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework. Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate? This paper frames the major challenges that stand in the way of this goal. Drawing on theory from organizational behavior and distributed computing, as well as direct feedback from workers, we outline a framework that will enable crowd work that is complex, collaborative, and sustainable. The framework lays out research challenges in twelve major areas: workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, real-time response, synchronous collaboration, quality control, crowds guiding AIs, AIs guiding crowds, platforms, job design, reputation, and motivation.

/pdf/the-future-of-crowd-work-2houizqbg3.pdf

The future of crowd work

The Future of Crowd Work

The past decade has seen a significant breakthrough in research on solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Where past solvers could not scale beyond perhaps a dozen states, modern solvers can handle complex domains with many thousands of states. This breakthrough was mainly due to the idea of restricting value function computations to a finite subset of the belief space, permitting only local value updates for this subset. This approach, known as point-based value iteration, avoids the exponential growth of the value function, and is thus applicable for domains with longer horizons, even with relatively large state spaces. Many extensions were suggested to this basic idea, focusing on various aspects of the algorithm--mainly the selection of the belief space subset, and the order of value function updates. In this survey, we walk the reader through the fundamentals of point-based value iteration, explaining the main concepts and ideas. Then, we survey the major extensions to the basic algorithm, discussing their merits. Finally, we include an extensive empirical analysis using well known benchmarks, in order to shed light on the strengths and limitations of the various approaches.

/pdf/a-survey-of-point-based-pomdp-solvers-40x63ndvgl.pdf

A survey of point-based POMDP solvers

Crowd-sourcing is a recent framework in which human intelligence tasks are outsourced to a crowd of unknown people ("workers") as an open call (e.g., on Amazon's Mechanical Turk). Crowd-sourcing has become immensely popular with hoards of employers ("requesters"), who use it to solve a wide variety of jobs, such as dictation transcription, content screening, etc. In order to achieve quality results, requesters often subdivide a large task into a chain of bite-sized subtasks that are combined into a complex, iterative workflow in which workers check and improve each other's results. This paper raises an exciting question for AI — could an autonomous agent control these workflows without human intervention, yielding better results than today's state of the art, a fixed control program?

We describe a planner, TURKONTROL, that formulates workflow control as a decision-theoretic optimization problem, trading off the implicit quality of a solution artifact against the cost for workers to achieve it. We lay the mathematical framework to govern the various decisions at each point in a popular class of workflows. Based on our analysis we implement the workflow control algorithm and present experiments demonstrating that TURKONTROL obtains much higher utilities than popular fixed policies.

/pdf/decision-theoretic-control-of-crowd-sourced-workflows-3cg52j3a6f.pdf

Decision-theoretic control of crowd-sourced workflows

POMDP-based control of workflows for crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk have become popular for a wide variety of human intelligence tasks; however, quality control continues to be a significant challenge. Recently, we propose TURKONTROL, a theoretical model based on POMDPs to optimize iterative, crowd-sourced workflows. However, they neither describe how to learn the model parameters, nor show its effectiveness in a real crowd-sourced setting. Learning is challenging due to the scale of the model and noisy data: there are hundreds of thousands of workers with high-variance abilities.

This paper presents an end-to-end system that first learns TURKONTROL's POMDP parameters from real Mechanical Turk data, and then applies the model to dynamically optimize live tasks. We validate the model and use it to control a successive-improvement process on Mechanical Turk. By modeling worker accuracy and voting patterns, our system produces significantly superior artifacts compared to those generated through nonadaptive workflows using the same amount of money.

/pdf/artificial-intelligence-for-artificial-artificial-48ie4mc51r.pdf

Artificial intelligence for artificial artificial intelligence

Crowdsourcing has become a popular and indispensable component of many problem-solving pipelines in the research literature, with crowd workers often treated as computational resources that can reliably solve problems that computers have trouble with, such as image labeling/classification, natural language processing, or document writing. Yet, obviously crowd workers are human, and long sequences of the same monotonous tasks might intuitively reduce the amount of good quality work done by the workers. Here we propose an investigation into how we can use diversions containing small amounts of entertainment to improve crowd workers' experiences. We call these small period of entertainment ``micro-diversions", which we hypothesize to provide timely relief to workers during long sequences of micro-tasks. We hope to improve productivity by retaining workers to work on our tasks longer and to either improve or retain the quality of work. We experimentally test micro-diversions on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a large paid-crowdsourcing platform. We find that micro-diversions can significantly improve worker retention rate while retaining the same work quality.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2675133.2675260

And Now for Something Completely Different: Improving Crowdsourcing Workflows with Micro-Diversions

Modern recommender systems often embed users and items into low-dimensional latent representations, based on their observed interactions. In practical recommendation scenarios, users often exhibit various intents which drive them to interact with items with multiple behavior types (e.g., click, tag-as-favorite, purchase). However, the diversity of user behaviors is ignored in most of the existing approaches, which makes them difficult to capture heterogeneous relational structures across different types of interactive behaviors. Exploring multi-typed behavior patterns is of great importance to recommendation systems, yet is very challenging because of two aspects: i) The complex dependencies across different types of user-item interactions; ii) Diversity of such multi-behavior patterns may vary by users due to their personalized preference. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a Multi-Behavior recommendation framework with Graph Meta Network to incorporate the multi-behavior pattern modeling into a meta-learning paradigm. Our developed MB-GMN empowers the user-item interaction learning with the capability of uncovering type-dependent behavior representations, which automatically distills the behavior heterogeneity and interaction diversity for recommendations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show the effectiveness of MB-GMN by significantly boosting the recommendation performance as compared to various state-of-the-art baselines. The source code is available athttps://github.com/akaxlh/MB-GMN.

Peng Dai

Papers

Decision-theoretic control of crowd-sourced workflows

POMDP-based control of workflows for crowdsourcing

Artificial intelligence for artificial artificial intelligence

And Now for Something Completely Different: Improving Crowdsourcing Workflows with Micro-Diversions

Graph Meta Network for Multi-Behavior Recommendation.